'By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.' The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) is William James's classic survey of religious belief in its most personal, and often its most heterodox, aspects. Asking questions such as how we define evil to ourselves, the difference between a healthy and a divided mind, the value of saintly behaviour, and what animates and characterizes the mental landscape of sudden conversion, James's masterpiece stands at a unique moment in the relationship between belief and culture. Faith in institutional religion and dogmatic theology was fading away, and the search for an authentic religion rooted in personality and subjectivity was a project conducted as an urgent necessity. With psychological insight, philosophical rigour, and a determination not to jump to the conclusion that in tracing religion's mental causes we necessarily diminish its truth or value, in the Varieties James wrote a truly foundational text for modern belief. Matthew Bradley's wide-ranging new edition examines the ideas that continue to fuel modern debates on atheism and faith. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature explores the nature of religion and, in James' observation, its divorce from science when studied academically. After publication in 1902 it quickly became a canonical text of philosophy and psychology, remaining in print through the entire century. "Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind."

How the sciences of the mind can advance the study of religion The essence of religion was once widely thought to be a unique form of experience that could not be explained in neurological, psychological, or sociological terms. In recent decades scholars have questioned the privileging of the idea of religious experience in the study of religion, an approach that effectively isolated the study of religion from the social and natural sciences. Religious Experience Reconsidered lays out a framework for research into religious phenomena that reclaims experience as a central concept while bridging the divide between religious studies and the sciences. Ann Taves shifts the focus from "religious experience," conceived as a fixed and stable thing, to an examination of the processes by which people attribute meaning to their experiences. She proposes a new approach that unites the study of religion with fields as diverse as neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, and psychology to better understand how these processes are incorporated into the broader cultural formations we think of as religious or spiritual. Taves addresses a series of key questions: how can we set up studies without obscuring contestations over meaning and value? What is the relationship between experience and consciousness? How can research into consciousness help us access and interpret the experiences of others? Why do people individually or collectively explain their experiences in religious terms? How can we set up studies that allow us to compare experiences across times and cultures? Religious Experience Reconsidered demonstrates how methods from the sciences can be combined with those from the humanities to advance a naturalistic understanding of the experiences that people deem religious.

This account of evil takes the Book of Job as its guide. The Book of Job considers physical pain, social bereavement, the origin of evil, theodicy, justice, divine violence, and reward. Such problems are explored by consulting ancient and modern accounts from the fields of theology and philosophy, broadly conceived. Some of the literature on evil - especially the philosophical literature - is inclined toward the abstract treatment of such problems. Bringing along the suffering Job will serve as a reminder of the concrete, lived experience in which the problem of evil has its roots.

Includes selections from Plato, Boethius, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, Kierkegaard, William James, Anthony Flew, accompanied by modern essays.

The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature is a book by the Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James comprising 20 lectures given at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. These lectures concerned the nature of religion and the neglect of science, in James' view, in the academic study of religion. Soon after its publication, the book found its way into the canon of psychology and philosophy, and has remained in print for over a century. James was most interested in direct religious experiences. Theology and the organizational aspects of religion were of secondary interest. He believed that religious experiences were simply human experiences: ""Religious happiness is happiness. Religious trance is trance."" He believed that religious experiences can have ""morbid origins"" in brain pathology and can be irrational but nevertheless are largely positive. Get Your Copy Now.

A comprehensive collection of writings by the legendary philosopher, whose sweeping body of work influenced our ideas about psychology, religion, free will, and pragmatism. In his introduction to this collection, John McDermott presents James's thinking in all its manifestations, stressing the importance of radical empiricism and placing into perspective the doctrines of pragmatism and the will to believe. The critical periods of James's life are highlighted to illuminate the development of his philosophical and psychological thought. The anthology features representative selections from The Principles of Psychology, The Will to Believe, and The Variety of Religious Experience in addition to the complete Essays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe. The original 1907 edition of Pragmatism is included, as well as classic selections from all of James's other major works. Of particular significance for James scholarship is the supplemented version of Ralph Barton Perry's Annotated Bibliography of the Writings of William James.

This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.

Classic text examines habit, consciousness, self, discrimination, the sense of time, memory, perception, imagination, reasoning, instincts, volition, much more. This edition omits the outdated first nine chapters.

This book draws on newly available archives from the Iraqi state and Ba'th Party to present a revisionist history of Saddam Hussein's religious policies. The point of doing this, other than to correct the current understanding of Saddam's political use of religion through his presidency, is to argue that the policies promoted then directly contributed to the rise of religious insurgencies in post-2003 Iraq as well as the current and probably future crises in the country. In looking at Saddam's policies in the 1990s, many have interpreted his support for state religion as evidence of a dramatic shift away from Arab nationalism, toward political Islam. But this book shows that the 'Faith Campaign' he launched during this time was the culmination of a plan to use religion for political ends, begun upon his assumption of the Iraqi presidency in 1979. At this time, Saddam began constructing the institutional capacity to control and monitor Iraqi religious institutions. The resulting authoritarian structures allowed him to employ Islamic symbols and rhetoric in public policy, but in a controlled manner. By the 1990s, these policies became fully realized. Following the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, religion remained prominent in Iraqi public life, but the system that Saddam had put in place to contain it was destroyed. Sunni and Shi'i extremists who had been suppressed and silenced were now free. They thrived in an atmosphere where religion had been actively promoted, and formed militant organizations which have torn the country apart since.